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$xhtml = array(
	'<{title}>' => 'Still waiting for pens',
	'takedown' => '2017-11-01',
	'<{body}>' => <<<END
<img src="/img/CC_BY-SA_4.0/y.st./weblog/2019/01/08.jpg" alt="Trees by the highway" class="framed-centred-image" width="649" height="480"/>
<section id="pens">
	<h2>Gel pen hunt</h2>
	<p>
		According to the tracking page, the company <strong>*still*</strong> hasn&apos;t sent my gel pen set.
		Slow post is something I can tolerate, but not even sending the package for over a week is an entirely different thing.
	</p>
	<p>
		I decided to make a small shopping trip today to deal with my frustration.
		I&apos;d look for three things: black gel pen paper, a nice gel pen set, and a twelve-pen gel pen set.
		If I found a nice set complete with case, and that set came with at least seventy-two pens, I&apos;d buy it and cancel my online order.
		Otherwise, I&apos;d buy the twelve-pen set and have something to draw with while I wait, then use those twelve pens to fill the empty twelve slots in the case of the set I ordered.
		I never could find that paper I waned.
		When I was a child, it seemed like they stocked that paper everywhere, but then again, I think gel pens were pretty new back then.
		There was probably a lot of hype by companies, and stores kept that sort of thing in stock to profit from that.
		The craft stores used to sell individual gel pens too.
		You could choose from hundreds of colours and not have to get them alongside pens you weren&apos;t as likely to use, but I guess they don&apos;t do that any more.
	</p>
	<p>
		As for pen sets, I saw maybe two large pen sets, and they didn&apos;t meet my criteria.
		The one large set I definitely recall seeing had fifty pens, ten less than the set I&apos;m waiting for the other company to send, and didn&apos;t come with any sort of case to store them in for travel.
		For twelve-pen sets, I encountered four.
		In the first store I successfully found some at, there were two sets to choose from.
		It was difficult to choose between the two, but I noticed the package on one of them advertised the pens to be refillable.
		From the looks of it, both sets were refillable, but knowing for sure that one was was as good a tie breaker as any.
		At the second store with twelve-pen sets, I found a better price, and both sets there even came with a smaller case, which would be nice for when I only want to carry twelve pens.
		After taking a closer look though, I noticed the bizarre shape of the ink tubes.
		At first, I thought they weren&apos;t refillable, which would definitely be a deal breaker.
		With tubes like that, the replacement tubes wouldn&apos;t fit the pens, even though the old tubes come out easily.
		After thinking on it though, I came to the conclusion that there&apos;s a chance this was some form of vendor lock-in.
		If you want to refill these pens, you might be able to get the ink tubes from the original manufacturer.
		Vendor lock-in is even more of a deal-breaker though.
	</p>
	<p>
		In the end, I decided not to get any of the pens though, despite half my options being normal, refillable pens.
		I&apos;m being very impatient, but I shouldn&apos;t act out of that impatience.
		I&apos;ll just keep waiting for the mail.
		Supposedly, the package will arrive somewhere from tomorrow to Friday.
		I just didn&apos;t realise that most of that wait time would be spent waiting for the pens to even be shipped, not just waiting for the postal service to deliver them.
		Of course, that&apos;s assuming the pens arrive in their scheduled window at all.
	</p>
</section>
<section id="drudgery">
	<h2>Drudgery</h2>
	<p>
		My discussion posts for the day:
	</p>
	<blockquote>
		<p>
			I&apos;m not sure how I&apos;d use it directly in a software algorithm.
			The Zipf distribution is more of a statistical approximation than something you write into code, as best I can tell.
			We can code things that account for the Zipf distribution, such as a Caesar Cipher decoder that guesses the correct rotation based on letter frequencies, but that&apos;s the best I can come up with as far as software-related Zipf distribution use.
		</p>
	</blockquote>
	<blockquote>
		<p>
			Like you said, Zipf&apos;s Law states that the second-highest probability is half that of the highest probability, and so on.
			That&apos;s what makes this distribution so bizarre.
			I&apos;m not sure many real-world things actually follow this trend.
			For probabilities to descend that way, the most-likely outcome will land at about the fifty percent mark.
			Using your city example, that would mean there exists a city that holds half the total human population.
		</p>
		<p>
			Or perhaps I missed something important and made a big mistake.
			Most of the resources I found on the Zipf distribution were pretty confusingly phrased.
		</p>
	</blockquote>
	<blockquote>
		<p>
			Reasoning does seem to be the strength of logic programming languages.
			However, though the textbook did say Prolog has several optimisations, there&apos;s no escaping the fact that much of how logic programming is carried out is via brute force.
			Many solutions are tried in order to find one or more correct solutions.
			I can&apos;t help but think there&apos;s got to be a better way.
		</p>
	</blockquote>
	<p>
		I&apos;ve gotten the reading assignments done now.
		There&apos;s still some touching up I&apos;ll need to do in my learning journal assignments, but I&apos;d say I have sufficiently enough done that I can head to Eugene tomorrow to check the recycling centre for a working scanner.
	</p>
</section>
END
);
